Grant Snider of Incidental Comics walks us down a path of encountering, exploring and even making art.

I vividly remember, many years ago, turning a corner at the Birmingham Museum of Art and seeing the enormous, majestic Dawn by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. It was stunning. I spent quite a bit of time later chasing down Bouguereaus when I heard that they were on public display.

I will not discount the aesthetic priorities of others, but to me, the Western tradition of art reached its zenith in the works of Bouguereau.

Which encounters with art have left a lasting impression on you?

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"Have you ever been in this position: really nice bottle of wine, no corkscrew?" A representative of Mirabeau Wine, a winemaker in southern France, asks this question. Then he shows an ingenious solution to the problem.

I took a different approach. When my corkscrew shredded the cork instead of gripping it, I used my electric drill and largest bit (1/4 inch) to drive a hole through the cork. Of course, this left a lot of cork bits in the wine. So I filtered the wine through the basket of my coffeemaker, thus removing the cork.

The wine tasted terrible anyway.

Richard Gray of the Daily Telegraph describes Mirabeau's technique as a "disarmingly simple way of taking the cork out of a bottle without a corkscrew that will become your new party trick this year." I predict many broken bottles and a lot of spilled wine.

(Image: unknown)

Other signs include a second cell phone and money suddenly disappearing from your joint account.

If the plane ticket is one-way, well, then you know what's going to happen.

It's hard. But believe me: once you get through this rough time, you'll be better off. You can do better anyway.

-via Pleated Jeans

It's common for daycare businesses to learn about the interests and habits of children who enroll. One daycare manager gave a friend of redditor JesadBellic this form to fill out when he enrolled his daughter, Emma, in the school.

Emma is 11 months old.

So some of these questions are probably not relevant to a child of that age. You can see a larger view of the responses here.

-via Glenn Reynolds

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For weeks, the football players at Olivet Middle School in Olivet, Michigan schemed how they would carry out their plan. Their goal was to give Keith Orr, a developmentally disabled student, the chance to score a touchdown.

So the team ran the ball all the down to the 1-yard line...and stopped. They grounded the ball.

On the next play, the passed the ball to Keith, then pushed the opposing team back the yard that Keith needed to score a touchdown.

Watch this video from CBS News to learn about how this act helped the players sort out their own values and priorities.

-via I Own the World

Electroplating is an electrical process that plates an object in dissolved metals. In the Nineteenth Century, some inventors thought that it would be an excellent way to preserve a dead body. Why rot away? Inside a thin but solid metal skin, your corpse could slowly mummify.

In a lengthy article, Atlas Obscura describes the history of this idea. Its proponents argued that it was an inexpensive and sanitary process. And since it preserved a body from decay, you could keep your relatives around the house as memorial statues.

-via VA Viper

Fabrizio Corneli says, "Light is energy which creates forms." That neatly summarizes his work. He's an artist in Florence, Italy who creates shadowy outlines mixed with vibrant colors. He does so by shaping custom lamps to project specific images at the proper angles.

This work, for example, is entitled Iperboreo I, which appears to mean "Hyperborean" in Italian. It's a halogen lamp inside copper sheeting. When observed from the front, it looks like a ball of fire. The ancient Greeks believed that the Hyperboreans were a people who lived in a paradise to the far north, beyond the harsh north winds. Perhaps this art installation represents their sunny domain.

Feeling sluggish in the morning? Clearly, your body hasn't been treating you right. It's time to punish it for its disloyalty. This breakfast sandwich by Pop Sugar is the way to do it.

First, you'll need donut chips. This (frustratingly self-starting) video by Brandi Milloy shows you how. Start with Krispie Kreme donuts. Slice them in half and dip the cut sides into a mixture of cinnamon and sugar. Mash them in a panini press for 30 seconds.

Now you're ready to make this sandwich. Place a lightly fried egg and two rashers of bacon between two donut chips. Add syrup, eat it and then feel terribly guilty.

-via Foodbeast

Dalek

BMO

Walter White

Totoro

C-3PO

Hoang Tran, an artist in Sunnyvale, California, carves and paints crayons into sculptures of your favorite characters from movies and television. This is only a small sampling of his work, which includes Game of Thrones sigils and anime characters.

Here's a time-lapse video that shows how he does it:

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-via Nerd Approved

She knows exactly how to push her son's buttons. Mostly because she installed them herself. Lunarbaboon reminds us that you remain a child to at least one person in your life.

Instructables member Gelotology calls it the Tweetball. It’s a custom-made Christmas tree ornament that displays a stream of tweets from a certain username, hashtag or keyword. I could have used this last Christmas because sometimes a whole hour might go by and I wouldn’t be able to check out my Twitter stream.

Gelotology made it with an Arduino controller and two PHP scripts. You can find his step-by-step instructions here.

-via Hack A Day

(A Real Book Dies t-shirt now on sale at the NeatoShop)

The process is called statistical stylometry. It looks at sentence structure and can predict with 84% accuracy whether a book will be a commercial success. Researchers at Stony Brook University in New York used the science to determine what makes books popular:

They found several trends that were often found in successful books, including heavy use of conjunctions such as “and” and “but” and large numbers of nouns and adjectives.

Less successful work tended to include more verbs and adverbs and relied on words that explicitly describe actions and emotions such as “wanted”, “took” or “promised”, while more successful books favoured verbs that describe thought processes such as “recognised” or “remembered”.

The researchers tested their algorithm by evaluating popular books in Project Gutenberg’s archives and low-sale books available on Amazon.

Could a computer with this knowledge write an excellent novel?

-via Popular Science

Cinderella

Belle

Leia

I would love to play a version of Street Fighter in which the Disney princesses were playable characters. Surely some game modder is up to the task!

In the meantime, we can enjoy these pixelated images and others by MikeV. They show several Disney princesses drawn in the style of Capcom's classic fighting video games.

Here are a couple fun cartoons from Dan Piraro of Bizarro Comics. Yes, spelling in hieroglyphics could be hard. But I suspect that it's even more difficult in Tamarian.

(Image: Wit Studio)

Attack on Titan is an anime series which premiered in 2013. It's set in a world in which, 100 years previously, humanity was almost annihilated by the sudden appearance of giants which swarmed over human settlements, feeding on people.

The remaining humans built enormous stone walls and retreated behind them. They are, presumably, the last remnants of the human race. They've lived there for a hundred years in safety. Then a new type of titan--their term for these giants--appears.

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Richard Eisenbeis, Kotaku's anime critic, calls Attack on Titan "the breakout anime of this past year." Having watched the series, I can understand why. It's a show about suffering, courage and perseverance. It has compelling characters and mysteries that have seized the interest of many fans around the world. Here are some of the works of art and crafts that they have made in response to the show.

Illustrator Ron Chan made this funny piece mashing up Attack on Titan with My Neighbor Totoro. Hange Zoë stands next to a friendly Colossal Titan, waiting for the bus.

This latte by an unknown artist shows a Colossal Titan attacking one of the walls.